Cutler v. Pardridge

182 Ill. App. 350, 1913 Ill. App. LEXIS 443
CourtAppellate Court of Illinois
DecidedOctober 14, 1913
DocketGen. No. 17,375
StatusPublished
Cited by7 cases

This text of 182 Ill. App. 350 (Cutler v. Pardridge) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Appellate Court of Illinois primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Cutler v. Pardridge, 182 Ill. App. 350, 1913 Ill. App. LEXIS 443 (Ill. Ct. App. 1913).

Opinion

Mr. Justice Barnes

delivered the opinion of the court.

This case comes here on appeal for the third time. Opinions rendered on prior appeals appear in 68 Ill. App. 569, reversed in 168 Ill. 504; and 104 Ill. App. 89. On each of the other occasions the judgment was in favor of" plaintiff; this time it is against him. The suit, based on the common counts, was to recover commissions and money paid out for losses on certain transactions made by appellant for appellee on the Board of Trade of the city of Chicago.

Appellee relied on three defenses: (1) that they were gambling transaction's; (2) that the contracts were wrongfully closed out in violation of a contract for credit; (3) that appellant could not recover his advances or commissions because he had not taken out a broker’s license under an ordinance of the city of Chicago. This last defense was not made in the former trials.

Appellant procured no license under the ordinance pleaded which made it unlawful for any person to exercise the business of broker, including that of produce or grain broker, without having first procured a license for such purpose, and imposed a penalty for its violation. One plea set up the ordinance as a bar to the entire suit, and another to the recovery of commissions. A demurrer to the first was sustained, the court thereby holding it was not a bar to the recovery of advances, and that to the second was overruled. Cross-errors are assigned to the first ruling mentioned, to which we will refer later.

There was a flat contradiction in the testimony relating to the first two defenses. The facts were sharply controverted. The testimony on the issues raised by them unquestionably presented a ease for the jury. On substantially the same character of testimony it was so held on the former appeals. It was important, therefore, that the jury should have been accurately instructed with respect thereto.

Plaintiff’s case consisted of proof of the individual transactions engaged in at defendant’s request. Defendant did not deny that they took place, or that the plaintiff was his authorized agent. He relied upon affirmative defenses, and the burden of proving them unquestionably rested upon him. Pelouze v. Slaughter, 241 Ill. 215; Richelieu Hotel Co. v. Military Encampment Co., 140 Ill. 248; Cothran v. Ellis, 125 Ill. 496; Clews v. Jamieson, 182 U. S. 461. The case, therefore, as tried and submitted to the jury, presented no contention as to plaintiff’s case, whether the transactions he relied on took place and were authorized, but simply whether defendant had established his affirmative defenses, or either of them, that such transactions were invalid and closed out in violation of a contract for credit.

On the question of burden- of proof, the Court gave the following instruction: “The plaintiff is required by law to establish Ms case by a preponderance of the evidence before he can recover. If the plaintiff in this suit has not established Ms case by such preponderance ; or if the evidence in support of Ms case is evenly balanced so that the jury are in doubt and unable to see on which side is the preponderance; or if the preponderance of the evidence is in favor of the defendant ; then in either of these cases the jury should find the issues for the defendant.”

What the jury understood by “his case,” in view of the fact that there was no controversy as to plaintiff’s case, but only upon the defenses thereto, it would be difficult to say. We think it was misleading. The jury were presumably not acquainted with the distinction between plaintiff’s case, which as submitted to them was not controverted, and hence called for no special direction of the jury as to the burden of proof with respect thereto, and the case which, as tried and submitted to them, involved only such controversies as were raised by affirmative defenses. They might, and probably did, think that before plaintiff could recover he was bound by law to establish the negative of such-defenses. The case of Rich v. Naffziger, 248 Ill. 455, is in point. There plaintiff brought an action guare clausum fregit and proved a record title to the close or premises in question. Defendant set up an affirmative defense,—adverse possession of the premises for a period of twenty years. Plaintiff’s record title was proved and not questioned, but at defendant’s request the court instructed the jury that the burden was upon plaintiff to prove the allegation that he was the owner of such close by the greater weight of the evidence, and that if the evidence was equally balanced or preponderated in favor of defendant, then upon that question their verdict should be for defendant. The instruction was held erroneous because the jury would understand therefrom that it required plaintiff to prove by a preponderance of the evidence, in order to establish his ownership and title, that defendant and his predecessor in title had not had adverse possession of the premises for the period of twenty years. And here the jury would understand from the instruction in question that in order to establish plaintiff’s claim, namely, for money paid out on transactions for defendant at his request, he would be required to prove by a preponderance of evidence that they were not gambling transactions, and that no such contract for credit as claimed by defendant had been entered into or violated; in other words, that he was required to disprove defendant’s claim. This, as stated in the Rich case, supra, he was not required to do. In view of the closeness of the evidence upon the issues, we are not satisfied that the jury were not misled to the prejudice of appellant by such instruction, and that there should be a new trial on that ground if for no other.

In view of this ruling we deem it necessary to refer to such instructions only as raise questions likely to be presented again on another trial. In number fourteen the jury were told that “if plaintiff knew, or by the exercise of ordinary prudence and care ought to have known * * * that the defendant * * * intended simply to speculate or wager upon the future prices of such commodities and to settle all such contracts by the payment or receipt of differences in market prices,” he could not recover.

In order to invalidate such contracts it was held in Jamieson v. Wallace, 167 Ill. 388, that it must appear that neither party has the intention to deliver the property, and that both parties have the intention of settling the differences only. To the same effect are Bartlett v. Slusher, 215 Ill. 348; Pratt & Co. v. Ash-more, 224 Ill. 587; First Nat. Bank of El Paso v. Miller, 235 Ill. 135; Pelouze v. Slaughter, supra; Clews v. Jamieson, supra.

In these cases, and others that might be cited, it was held that the question of intention was to be determined by a consideration of all the evidence and may be determined from the nature of the transaction and from the manner and method of carrying on the business.

It appears in the record that settlements on the Board of Trade are frequently made by “set-off” and by “ringing off,” and it was held in Board of Trade of Chicago v. Christie Grain & Stock Co., 198 U. S. 236, where such methods were reviewed that they had all the “effects of delivery,” and agáin in Cleage v. Laidley, 79 C. C. A. 284, 149 Fed.

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Bluebook (online)
182 Ill. App. 350, 1913 Ill. App. LEXIS 443, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/cutler-v-pardridge-illappct-1913.